A SHORT DEFENSE OF TIM BURTON

 I saw the following quoted from Roger Ebert with respect to Tim Burton:

..design over story, style over substance - a great-looking movie with a plot you can’t care much about.

 I have a probably unprovable theory that Burton's mature creativity was strongly influenced, as he came into his own, by his apprenticeship at Disney's animation department.

With animated movies, plot, in the sense I believe Ebert's using, is far less important than character. Whereas in live-action films the characters can literally become cogs in an overarching plot-- Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS comes to mind here-- animated characters need vivid scenarios that express what each of them can do. The structure is more like vaudeville, or a Marx Brothers movie. A loose plot allows characters to come out "on stage," establish their personas, and bounce off other characters as needed. 

That's how Burton's movies seem constructed to me. It's not "style without substance," as Ebert says, but the substance is more free-flowing. With METROPOLIS, one knows the theme behind the plot, because the storyteller is very overt in expressing said theme. But what's the theme of BEETLEJUICE? One may be present, but it's not overt by any means. The theme isn't expressed by the precise movements of the plot, but by all the character-arcs bouncing off one another until things are sorted out as the storyteller desires.

This approach worked well with BEETLEJUICE and Burton's two BATMAN films but not with DARK SHADOWS. With both BATMAN and DARK SHADOWS, Burton had a certain range of characters he had to play off one another, sometimes because of producer interference (he reputedly didn't want the Penguin in RETURNS). But he was able to impose a loose structure on RETURNS, with Max Schreck bringing Catwoman into being and trying to use Penguin to his own ends. With SHADOWS Burton seems at a loss, unable to figure out how to boil down the unwieldy ensemble of long-term characters into something he could work with.